In 2014, Drew Baglino was helping build Tesla’s energy division with a passionate, scrappy team. Using parts from Tesla’s vehicles, they created the first Powerwall home battery. But as demand grew, they hit a critical bottleneck: cell shortages.
Customers across multiple markets were already excited about the Powerwall, but Drew’s team struggled to keep up with demand. With Powerwall 2 already announced, pressure mounted while the supply chain faltered. And with Tesla prioritizing vehicles, the energy team was left to “get the scraps and figure it out.”
In this episode, Lara Pierpoint talks with Drew Baglino, former senior vice president of powertrain and energy at Tesla, about building a new product category through bootstrapping and creative resource sharing. Drew shares how a couple dozen “Swiss Army knife” engineers created a residential battery system that would ultimately define the market.
Credits: Hosted by Lara Pierpoint. Produced by Erin Hardick. Edited by Anne Bailey and Stephen Lacey. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor.
The Green Blueprint is a co-production of Latitude Media and Trellis Climate. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get podcasts.
Transcript
Tag: Latitude Media Podcast at the Frontier of Climate Technology.
Drew Baglino: I went on a bachelor party one weekend and it was to this house that was off grid and I was just looking at how kludgy the setup was with the solar and the power electronics and the batteries. It was some lead acid system and I was just super motivated at the end of that weekend to Tesla can do this so well. We know so much about power electronics, we know so much about batteries and it just seems obvious that this is going to happen.
Lara Pierpoint: I love by the way that this story starts in some sense with a bachelor party because I feel like this is something that I share and many of us who are energy nerds do that. There’s always that story of the time. Some people drink beer at bachelor parties. The rest of us spend time looking at Klugy energy systems and dreaming about new products they could take over the world, so high appreciation for that
Drew Baglino: Totally.
Lara Pierpoint: In 2013, Drew Baglino was a systems engineer at Tesla. He’d been at the company for about seven years and was helping to develop its first commercial sedan. The Model S.
Drew Baglino: Was technical lead on the battery projects we did with Daimler Powertrain Projects with Toyota Powertrain Architect for Model S. All of these were really formative, engaging problem statements that were meaty and over time I kept luckily being given the opportunity to take on other meaty problem statements, one of which was energy.
Lara Pierpoint: That year Drew went to a bachelor party at that off-grid house and without fully thinking through how he was going to charge his Tesla Roadster to get back home, he drove it there. Remember this was 2013 when charging infrastructure was scarce, so to charge his car, he started tinkering with the home, solar and battery system.
Drew Baglino: So it was already getting up in the business of the electrical system of this house, figuring out how I could charge this register and doing that made it even more apparent to me that there’s some real low hanging fruit to improve home electrification,
Lara Pierpoint: And it did improve a lot. Three years later, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk stood on stage at a launch event in Los Angeles to announce the second generation of the company’s residential battery.
Elon Musk: So we’d like to introduce the Powerwall too. This is a big step above the power wall one. It has twice as much energy, more than twice as much power in basic terms. You can take a four bedroom house and you can power your fridge, the sockets and lights for a day.
Lara Pierpoint: The Powerwall was a 14 kilowatt hour stationary battery with a seven kilowatt power output and it revolutionized home energy storage in large part. This was thanks to Drew.
Drew Baglino: I started working on that in 2014. I became the lead engineer, built the energy engineering team, and developed and launched Powerwall One Powerwall, two, three Powerpack, one two, and then Megapack one and Megapack two, and it was tough.
Lara Pierpoint: Drew left Tesla in 2024 among everything he built at the company. One of his proudest accomplishments was helping build an entirely new energy business for the EV maker.
Drew Baglino: The energy business was heavily supported by the vehicle business through many years to be frank, but finally kind of got out of that bird’s nest and was able to fly on its own and generate serious profits and bring cash back to the Tesla broader company, and it was really a fulfilling journey.
Lara Pierpoint: I am Lara Pierpoint and this is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy. We’ve already invented most of the solutions needed to decarbonize the global economy, but many of these technologies are not yet commercial and they need to get financed and built at scale. We don’t have decades to get them commercialized. We have years. This week I talk with Drew Baglino, former senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy at Tesla, about building a storage product that would break open the market for home batteries.
Drew Baglino: The best way to get the most value out of that fixed infrastructure is to have it be bi-directional and use near its full capability all day long. The lowest cost way to leverage that infrastructure is to have energy and storage really on both sides, both at the edge and at the center.
Lara Pierpoint: In the early 2010s, Tesla started exploring stationary storage. The company was driving battery costs down as it ramped its vehicle production, and it started to see an opportunity in the market beyond just cars.
Drew Baglino: Tesla had done a very early, we call it, it doesn’t even have a name. It was called you could call a Powerwall Zero. It was like a sort of cobbled together model S battery module. I think we did a thousand of these early systems with Solar City, and it was like a self-generation incentive program, trial program really to see if residential batteries could work.
Lara Pierpoint: As Tesla and Solar City were experimenting with these early battery systems, the solar market started to shift dramatically net metering policies, which allow solar customers to sell excess electricity back to the grid. At retail rates were being overhauled in key markets like Hawaii and California. The rapid adoption of solar on homes in those markets was starting to fully saturate the grid.
Drew Baglino: When Solar City saw the coming sort of net metering change of policy, they knew that it was almost existential to them to have a great battery offering.
Lara Pierpoint: So Solar City asked Tesla to make a battery for them. The battery had to be compatible with a variety of inverters because of Solar City’s partnerships with different vendors.
Drew Baglino: It was a little bit more work for Tesla. We basically had to be compatible with all of these different batteries, sorry, different inverters I should say, but it maybe was a little bit easier for them to manage from a deployment perspective. They didn’t have to only use one inverter type with the Tesla battery for example,
Lara Pierpoint: And that’s what led to the Powerwall one. The deployment and the integration of that particular product were very complicated. This involved a lot of moving parts, but it allowed Tesla to bring a product to market.
Drew Baglino: Tesla at the time didn’t have a channel to the end customer in the residential space necessarily. We didn’t have the time to develop a grid interactive inverter that could back up a house like we didn’t have the team initially. The energy engineering team was really quite small, so it was a way to get a full however kludgy system together that could show the value of stationary storage and enabling solar to still provide value and energy independence and backup power.
Lara Pierpoint: In 2017, California ramped up public safety power shutoffs or PSPS utilities would intentionally shut down portions of the grid to mitigate wildfire risk and to prevent system failures, but it met many Californians faced prolonged outages, which then drove more demand for home-based backup power.
Drew Baglino: Really a home battery wasn’t just about making solar residential solar valuable and affordable, but also about providing you some amount of energy resiliency, energy security, and so that power Powerwall one system I think showed all of that to the end customer and also showed the roadmap to make it better.
Lara Pierpoint: Tesla launched Powerwall one in April of 2015. Just over a year later, it launched Powerwall two and acquired Solar City also. During this time, the company had announced a new ev, the Model X and was working on what would become its bestselling car. The model three things were moving fast, and Drew and his team were doing their best to keep up with growing product demand while fighting for resources internally. I asked Drew what it was like during that time, the sacrifices he made and how his team built the battery that spawned the home storage market. Talk a little bit about what it took to build the team within Tesla and your approach to building it and how you thought about resources, because I think first blush folks could look at what you are doing there and say, gosh, this is the dream, right? As you’re part of this much bigger company with all these resources, and so you don’t have to go fighting for VC funding and things like that. But I think it actually comes with a different set of challenges to be part of a bigger company that has a big focus on something that’s maybe adjacent but not the same sort of core problem that you’re ultimately trying to solve. So can you talk a little bit about those dynamics and ultimately how you created a team and how you all functioned within Tesla?
Drew Baglino: I mean, it was truly bootstrapping. We had to be extremely scrappy because in this period of time, from 2014 to ultimately 2019, Tesla was definitely not sustainably profitable on the car side and not just was it not sustainably profitably, we went through some very challenging times like the model three ramp in 2017 and 2018. In that period of time, we were able to build a small very, I would say Swiss Army knife, Marine Corps, jack of all trades group of people that could put together that early power wall one and power pack two, power wall two programs. This was like a couple dozen group of people that made that all happen on the engineering side. And we also benefited from the fact that there was a little bit of disruption in the solar space at that time. You had companies like SunPower and others, sun Edison, a large sort of restructuring of the solar industry, the whole Solar City acquisition.
There was some talent available and so we could really pick demonstrated talented individuals that had done utility scale solar projects that had done great things in the power electronic space in the early days of solar, and then the Solar City acquisition itself. There was a lot of efficiency found in that integration. Not everybody stayed for sure through that acquisition, but the best people did. It also helped that Solarity had a pipeline of projects that they had built on the power pack side in particular. That gave some clear targets to the energy engineering organizations like, Hey, you got to deliver this stuff. And then that was another thing that in general I would say we did well, which was whether it was the Southern California Anderson project with Mari or the Harsdale project, we had clear problem statements that we had to go and do that.
There were financial implications if we didn’t do another big one that was important to Megapack One success was actually the PG&E Moss Landing installation. These were huge projects that the company was signed up to do. Elon CEO says, yes, we’re going to go do that. You then work with finance and with your partnering organizations to find a way to do it as scrappy but not crappy as possible and find a way to get it done. And then there was some sharing that happened too. One of the things that Tesla probably continues to do well, but certainly did well when I was there, it was like, what is the urgent problem? And so we were able to focus in 2016 on ramping the energy module line to a thousand, 2000 modules a week for Powerwall two and for Power Pack two. And in some ways that commitment to deliver the Southern California Edison project by the end of 2016 really juiced the module ramp.
And we brought software engineers, mechanical engineers, everybody from Palo Alto up to Reno. In fact, the best the first products made in Reno were Power pack and Powerwall. It was a real rallying point to get everybody up there, ramp the line, make it happen. And we continued to ramp up all of that for Harsdale, which was mid 2017. And then we had this sort of core energy team that had ramped some challenging products to ramp. That team was then primed to kind of support the vehicle team ramp model three, and we did. We spent a good six to nine months the energy team up in Reno doing that.
Lara Pierpoint: So was this all smooth and easy or were there moments of tension in all of this? I imagine that you’ve got all this really amazing talent at the same time you’re being very public about these projects that you’re ultimately pursuing. So when you needed it, was it easy to marshal the resources you required within the company to deliver on these things or did you have to still kind of fight for them in the moments when things mattered to you?
Drew Baglino: It was intense nights and weekends situation burning the midnight oil as they say. I had my three month olds first son and my wife with me up in Reno living out of the Whitney P Hotel. I was there on Thanksgiving Day. It was that kind of situation, but hey, it was like we were doing stuff that we felt passionate about, but I think beyond that, there are difficult trades to make. In that 2016 period, we were developing the energy module, it was also the same time that the a hundred kilowatt hour module for Model S and X was being developed and the module for model three. And the interesting thing was they each went different directions. So it’s important as the broader context to consider that this was still the time when battery cells and battery modules were coming down the cost curve really quickly, and there wasn’t an obviously best way to do anything.
And in 2016, we’re literally trying three different ways to make a cylindrical cell module. And so manufacturing engineering was not easy to come by to think about how to develop the automation for all of these different ways to do cylindrical cell modules. And so there was a lot of people wearing multiple hats. There was some strategic moves to partner with some awesome automation houses that helped Tesla out. The way I would describe it is jumping on the most critical thing that week and harnessing the team to do that. And being very fluid with how you’re allocating folks. Like I said, software engineers working on the manufacturing line. That kind of stuff was happening a lot and for some people that wasn’t for them, but for a lot of people I think it was super rewarding when it worked to go through that.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s very cool. It seems like, so everybody was kind of okay with this and they were interested in working on different things at different times and it worked out pretty fluidly. Or were there any moments where you were like, I can’t get what I need to make this happen, particularly on the Powerwall?
Drew Baglino: Yeah, it was tough. Not everybody was okay with it. Some people couldn’t hack it or left on their own accord. Specifically on the Powerwall we did, we had this blitz, I think we called it the module line blitz where we were burning down a huge list of action items to figure out how to ramp that energy module line. And it was everything from how do we figure out how to get the potting to cure faster to the module pallet doesn’t work and needs to be completely redesigned and let’s figure out how to get that done. And the people that made the pallet said, it’s going to take six months. Let’s figure out how to get it done in two weeks. Just really stretching people to do things that they didn’t know they could do. And then there’s always some things that have to give, especially as we got into 2017 and 2018, there was a cell sort of pinch.
Panasonic was having a hard time ramping, and we didn’t have enough cells to go around between vehicles and energy. And so we had to pair back on the Powerwall bill plan, which was tough. And it was tough, especially in light of this growing backlog we had because of all of the PSPS and people became frustrated that they had to wait really long for our Powerwall. And again, the same thing happened by the way, in the Covid crisis where there were semiconductor shortages. It was kind of like, Hey, vehicle’s, the breadwinner energy, you’re going to have to get the scraps and figure it out. And I think those were all the right calls. It was tough, and we had, it actually happened more than once with Powerwall one to some extent, and Powerwall two again, where we got a lot of people really excited in the loss of markets that really wanted the product and then we couldn’t really deliver the product. In one case, it was not enough cells. In another case, it was not enough semiconductors and it burned a lot of relationships. It burned a lot of people out in the team that were really sad. But this is the sausage making of building a company. You can’t win ’em all
Lara Pierpoint: At this point. Drew was an executive at the company serving as the vice president of technology at Tesla Energy. The power Wall two had already been announced and pressure was mounting to get the product to market, but the supply chain just couldn’t keep up with Tesla’s growing business. Drew set out to fix it. We’ll get to that after the break. So let’s talk about one moment of that evolution because as you mentioned, you had a massive sell shortage and you’re really trying to get product out there. So what did that look like? So what exactly were your conversations like with Panasonic when you understood that they couldn’t supply at the level you required? And then what did your conversations look like with new suppliers? How did you negotiate those contracts? How fast were you trying to push everyone? What was that like?
Drew Baglino: It was highly collaborative with Panasonic. Both Tesla and Panasonic had to help each other bring labor into the area. They were huge employers in that area, the first big factory in Reno. So there was a lot of collaboration there helping each other out. Myself and other members of my team kind of volunteered to go in and help debottleneck their ramp up of their new lines. We simplified their life by telling them they didn’t need to make the energy sale anymore, even though that was hard for Powerwall, but it was necessary for them to ramp vehicles. But at the same time, it built a conviction in our minds to find new sources of supply, which again is not easy. I think it’s important to remember at this time, this was probably 2017 when this was actually happening. There weren’t a lot of well-renowned high quality sell suppliers out there, and we didn’t want to be involved in something that wasn’t going to be like a volume play.
One of the reasons why we went with cylindrical cells in the first place was because they were the only batteries built in high volume. And it wasn’t just about, but about commitment to safety and reliability, because especially with stationary storage, but also with vehicles like you’re talking about something that needs to survive through 4,000 to 10,000 cycles, 10 to 15 to 20 years, you need to really have confidence that whatever spire you’re going to go with is actually going to deliver a reliable and ultimately safe product. And ultimately, we went with the best, the supplier that impressed us the most at the time in terms of their commitment to those things and their commitment to grow with us in the energy business. I mean, a lot of people didn’t see it as an obvious thing at that period of time, and it worked out. I mean, I think LG took a big bet.
I remember going and spending a lot of time in Korea and explaining, what is residential battery? Why would somebody want it? What is a good battery? What are these things for? There was a good amount of fun at some Korean restaurants, and ultimately they took a bet on Tesla, on our team, on the energy side, and it ended up paying off for them when they ended up getting an opportunity to participate with the vehicle business in China and vehicle business and other places. So it is with any business transaction, it’s like are you finding a willing and capable partner that is excited to go on the journey with you? And that is very much a personal eye to eye thing. And that’s why the time in Asia was so valuable at the end. I remember signing that contract and taking a bunch of photos, and actually when I left Tesla, the guy who I worked on the contract with at LG sent me the photo, was like, I still remember that day. He like, it was so awesome what we did, what made happen.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, I mean, this is such a fascinating story and I love that you’re emphasizing the relationship side of things because I think that matters so much in so many aspects of what climate companies have to do, particularly when it comes to scaling. I’m really curious though, because as you were telling this story, one of the things I found myself doing is making a tally of who on which side of the table has leverage based on various factors. Because it seems like for you all, I assume LG and Samsung, they knew that you needed to move as quickly as possible, that you had some customers who were demanding some product. They probably also knew that there were not thousands of suppliers that could build what you wanted at the safety levels that you required. And then as you say, to some extent, it sounds like they started to believe in what you could do as a company, but you’re also at the level of explaining why people want residential batteries. So can you say a bit more about how the leverage felt in the negotiation? Did it feel like it was trivial for you to get them to a place where they realized this was a big market for them or was it trickier than that?
Drew Baglino: It was tricky. It was not easy, especially given how the level of expectations we held the suppliers to. It was not easy. To give you a sense of what it was like at the time when I was working with lg, I was interacting with their IT applications subdivision. I wasn’t talking to their head of vehicle batteries or anything like that. And that was because that’s where the cylindrical cells were within LG at the time. It was not, they considered pouch cells to be their vehicle cell form factor. And I think actually in some ways that was a good thing because the laptop industry had sort of moved away from cylindrical cells at this point led by Apple and others, slimmer and slimmer all the time. POUCH had become dominant. And so this IT business unit within LG was like, well, I need to find something to be relevant, and so if flat tops aren’t going to be repeat sales outside of Korea and maybe Japan, a couple markets, I’m going to need to find a new thing.
And so that helped. It’s hard to overstate just how amazing it is to have businesses that are willing to take large risks. Like the gay factory in Reno was a huge risk taken by Panasonic to build a single factory bigger than all other factories combined in a new country where they had never done battery manufacturing before in a state with no manufacturing base, Nevada with a startup company that is going to equity finance. It was wild that it all came together. It was a lot of JB Elon and Kurt and the leadership at Panasonic coming together and being like, this risk is worth taking.
Lara Pierpoint: Part of what I’m hearing is a through point to your story is just all the synergies that existed between the car manufacturing side and what you were doing on the energy side. And obviously there’s some tensions there, but just so many benefits with respect to the glow that you get from big companies being willing to take risks from the relationships that result as a matter of course, and the fact that you can kind of move people in and out of where things are required the most. So I really hope that in as much as there are folks from big companies that are hearing this, that they’re thinking about this because there’s some really cool things you could do with this approach.
Drew Baglino: Yeah, I think you need to be creative about that and try not to get stuck in a rut. I think that there was a real platform opportunity that came out of reusing pieces of technology. The first supercharger, it’s sometimes called like V two or V one. The chargers in the supercharger are the onboard charger for Model S. That just I think exemplifies the platform play that is possible with smart reuse of technology. And again, as I was talking about, early Powerwall had the Model S battery module in it, and I think that is the way to be efficient with resources is how do you be strategic with reuse the firmware team on the energy side, use the continuous integration system of release management and so much carryover software to do battery management, to do build management, to do communications infrastructure. So much stuff was reused.
And this is actually, I think one of the big benefits of an in-office culture is you just see it’s like, Hey, look at that thing over on that desk. I think I could stick that and that as my power supply or whatever. It’s more visible on how you can build another great product out of parts you largely already have in your ecosystem. And when you look at Optimus as an example, which is the robot program at Tesla, why is Optimus going quickly at Tesla? It’s because, hey, there’s a lot of reuse of platform technologies, whether it’s how do you a simulation tool for how you optimize a motor actuator or literally the foundational AI stack behind the image processing and the neural nets between the car driving itself and the robot walking around. It’s a real platform play.
Lara Pierpoint: And so as you built that, you fought a whole lot of battles. And so you’ve mentioned some of these that the learnings from the Powerwall one and the initial scrappiness challenges with cell supply needing to move over to ramp the model three. When was the moment that you knew that the second Powerwall was a commercial success? Because that was a huge milestone for you, right?
Drew Baglino: Yeah, that felt awesome, especially through the struggles with the sell shortages and things like that. I think it was when the VPP success and we saw that translate into the requests from lots of places around the globe to repeat it when we saw the Green Mountain power model be replicated with other utilities. And when we saw the channel partners on the direct business basically to the end customer, either directly through Tesla Solar or through partners like Sunrun Sunnova and others, just keep asking for more. I think Puerto Rico was, we had that hurricane in Puerto Rico where the grid was out for so long and it really drove a lot of demand for energy resiliency and grid support on the battery side. And Puerto Rico is still one of the largest Powerwall markets, which is kind of wild. Not a lot of people live Puerto Rico, but I think it might be the single largest Powerwall market still just the customer happiness with the final products and things like Stormwatch and finally persevering through sales shortages, supply chain shortages, and hitting seven K Powerwalls per week and Reno and taking all of that learning into Powerwall three and have that hit the market with such success.
I mean, that’s not a single answer I know, but maybe if I were to zoom out and provide you a pithy simple answer, I knew Powerwall two was a success when Powerwall became the term for a home battery. And when people were like, it’s talking to me in the street. They’re like, I really need a home battery. I need a Powerwall. Do you know where I can get that? And they don’t even know that Tesla makes it. They just know that they need it. And then on top of that, when I went to, this was maybe two or three years ago, I went to Inter Solar or whatever it’s called now plus, and the every booth has a residential battery. When you go into the trade show and there’s so many copycats, that’s when you’ve made a successful product. And that is definitely the situation today.
Lara Pierpoint: Yeah, totally. When you start getting a definition in the dictionary, all la Kleenex meaning the word for tissue, you’ve made it. I love that.
Drew Baglino: Yeah, we didn’t actually have that name solidified until the day before the Powerwall presentation in 2016.
Lara Pierpoint: That’s amazing. Were there other options on the table in that moment, or was it just like,
Drew Baglino: I don’t remember the other ones, but for sure that name was not selected until maybe even the hour before the presentation. I mean, it definitely was within 24 hours of the presentation on stage when we sort of announced Powerwall one and Powerpack two. I mean, Powerpack one. Yeah,
Lara Pierpoint: I love that. Okay. Well, let’s talk about a couple of the lessons learned. I want to ask you a leadership question. You were describing a really intense environment where you got a small scrappy team. Everybody’s a jack of all trades. You’re needing to be fluid between even working on the product you’re working on versus going back and working on car manufacturing, all those sorts of things. You’re talking about nights and weekends. This is a really intense environment. And so I’m curious to know what made you successful as a leader under those conditions? Was it about choosing the right people and them having intrinsic passion to do this? Or was there something you were doing on a consistent basis to motivate the team and to get the outcomes that you ultimately got?
Drew Baglino: You’re absolutely right. You need to have an impedance match between the talent you bring into the company and the problem statement of the company, and I think a lot of people realize when they’re joining a startup that this is not a phone it in type gig. And while Tesla was public at this point, 2014 to 2019, it certainly wasn’t stably profitable and people knew what they were signing up for. Elon said things like elite Navy Seal, that’s the kind of talent we’re trying to draw, and it’s not wrong. It was a high expectations environment. But the great thing about Tesla then and now in different ways was you saw clear impact of what you were doing, creating a new product category, residential batteries that enable solar penetration to continue to increase or stationary storage at the utility scale that streamline higher and higher renewable penetrations at the sort of market scale.
You can get up to places like California now where many hours during the day, it’s a hundred percent renewable and battery, just the way the grid has gone from zero gigawatts of storage deployed in 2014 to 2024. Tesla alone did 30 gigawatt hours. I mean, it’s pretty amazing what you can do in 10 years. And people saw that visibly come together and they saw their imprint on it physically coming together. Even if it felt odd as a software engineer to be doing manufacturing line ramp, you could see that the ramp was happening because of the contributions that you made. And I think that that really motivated people.
Lara Pierpoint: You mentioned early on as we were talking, some of the tensions between working on the core engineering versus spending time on aesthetics. And this is something that doesn’t come up often I think, in the climate world, right? Because too often we’re in a business to business sort of environment. We don’t necessarily have to make things beautiful, we just have to make them functional. But it’s different for the handful of businesses that are ultimately developing consumer products. So do you have advice or learnings on how best to focus your attention when there are some of those trade-offs between aesthetics and functionality?
Drew Baglino: I think there can be too much focus on aesthetics while missing attention to detail, because actually what really matters is that attention to detail. A great example with Powerwall two. We were like, we still want the product to look beautiful, but it needs to also seem rugged. It’s a part of your house and you want it to last forever. It shouldn’t have a fancy plastic enclosure. It should look like it’s robust, so it should be, it’s made out of steel and you go touch it and you’re like, yeah, this is solid. But at the same time, we wanted it to feel beautiful and something you’re proud to have on the front of your house. And again. Okay, so that’s all well and good. Well, how do you translate that in terms of attention to detail to the end customer? Well, a good way is to have them take the wrap off and then they’re like, they get to experience that, and you need to wrap because you have this aesthetic, a surface product, you’re going to stick it in packaging and move it around the world, and installers are going to be manipulating it, and you don’t want it to get damaged.
But then when the customer actually kind of peels off that plastic film and sees their product for the first time, it’s like they really appreciate what they just installed. And then combining that with a very simple streamlined commissioning experience where they get to understand all the things that their product can do so that it’s not an afterthought. So I think people sometimes lose the customer journey by over focusing on one thing at the expense of the whole thing.
Lara Pierpoint: One last question. Elon Musk, slightly controversial figure at the moment. Any comments on his interaction with what brought the Powerwall and the energy side to be on this and where things are going now?
Drew Baglino: Yeah, hands down, the energy business of Tesla could not have gotten to where it got to without Elon’s input, both as a major advocate in the early days and as a strong force for acceleration on doing big projects like the Harsdale project going big or going home basically like, we’re not going to do this business if it’s going to be small. That was something he said a lot, and it was great to have that sort of passionate support for it in the early days. And he, as a leader, just generally against me as an engineering accountable individual for many years at Tesla, until I was the business leader for energy at the end, he pushes for excellence. And excellence is, it’s never light enough. It’s never affordable enough, it, it’s never easy enough to install, it’s never enough. That passion that he brought to every design interaction really motivated us to make great products, and it was essential to the success of the iterative progress of the products over time. So I would thank him for that contribution to it and for many others, of course, and maybe leave it at that.
Lara Pierpoint: Fair enough. Alright. Awesome. Thank you so much, Drew. This was amazing. I really appreciate the conversation. Awesome stories, really interesting to hear about this journey in the energy sector, and I look forward to talking to you down the road about hair and power once you all are building transformers.
Drew Baglino: Yeah, yeah. And maybe other things, so sounds good. Lara.
Lara Pierpoint: Drew Baglino is the former senior vice president of Powertrain and Energy at Tesla. He recently launched a new power electronics company called Heron Power. The Green Blueprint is produced by Latitude Media in partnership with Trellis Climate. The show is hosted by me, Lara Pierpoint. Our producer is Erin Hardick. Anne Bailey is our senior editor. Sean Marquand is our technical director. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. If you’d like to suggest topics or guests for the show, send an email to thegreenblueprint@latitudemedia.com. You can listen to The Green Blueprint at latitudemedia.com or subscribe wherever you get podcasts. And if you have fellow clean energy or climate tech travelers who would benefit from the insights in this show, send them a link. This is The Green Blueprint, a show about the architects of the clean energy economy.
